New Intel 10nm chips arrive holiday season 2019

Intel has previously said its 10nm chips will arrive in 2019. But on Thursday, the company got more specific: the upcoming processors will land on store shelves at the end of 2019, during the holiday season.

The first 10nm chips to launch will be for consumer PCs, with server-based chips to shortly follow, Intel executives said during an earnings call.

Why the continued delays? That’s been an ongoing question facing the chipmaker’s plans for the processors, which were originally slated to arrive in 2016.

During the conference call, the company’s chief engineering officer Venkata Renduchintala said Intel was still honing the 10nm manufacturing process, which requires packing an even greater number of transistors on a piece of silicon. “Recall that 10nm strives for a very aggressive density improvement target beyond 14nm. Almost a 2.7x scaling,” he said.

Intel doesn’t want to rush the technology’s development and will wait until it can confidently manufacture the next-generation processors in volume. In the meantime, consumers will have to make do with Intel’s 14 nm chips, which it’s been shipping with ongoing improvements since 2014.

According to Intel, the 10nm chips will offer a 25 percent performance increase over the 14nm chips at the same power level. A 10nm chip can also use 50 percent less power when running at the same performance of a 14nm chip.

The continued delays around the upgraded chip technology come as Intel rival AMD is promising to bring 7nm-made processors to the market in 2019. However, Intel executives said they remain confident that their existing 14nm chip products will keep the company competitive in the short-term.

“We’re very pleased with the resiliency of our 14nm roadmap,” Renduchintala said during the call. “In the last few years, we’ve delivered in excess of 70 percent product performance improvement as we moved through our 14nm generation of products.”